An American educator, grandnephew of the theologian Samuel Hopkins, and brother of the astronomer Albert Hopkins. He was born at Stockbridge, Mass., was educated at Williams College, was tutor there for two years, and after studying medicine and practicing for a short time in New York, became professor of moral philosophy in Williams in 1830, and president of the institution in 1836. He resigned the position in 1872, but remained college preacher and incumbent of the chair of moral philosophy. In 1857 he had become president of the American Board of Foreign Missions. Undoubtedly one of the greatest of American educators of his day, Hopkins did much to build up the prestige of Williams College and much more to develop the individual student. He was a powerful preacher and a successful lecturer. He published: “The Influence of the Gospel in Liberalizing the Mind” (1831); “The Connexion Between Taste and Morals” (1841); his Lowell Lectures, “The Evidences of Christianity” (3d ed. 1875); “Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews” (1847); a second series of Lowell Lectures, “Moral Science” (1862); “The Law of Love and Love as a Law” (last ed. 1881); “An Outline Study of Man” (last ed. 1893); “Strength and Beauty” (1874; in 1884 under the title “Teachings and Counsels”) and “The Scriptural Idea of Man” (1883).

Personal

  It is becoming customary for the head of a college to do little or no work of instruction, but it is doubtful whether the office of president, important and honorable as it is, would have had much attraction for Dr. Hopkins separated from the duties of the class-room. For the general administrative duties he had no special taste. During the first year of his presidency he said he would willingly give up half his salary if he had nothing to do but teach. Teaching was his great work. He could, indeed, do all things well. His quickness of perception, his excellent judgment, his conscientious fidelity, enabled him to succeed in all the work of college administration; but he felt that his place was in the class-room. He was truly a prince among teachers. Probably no college president, no college teacher, has ever impressed young men more strongly…. In all respects he was a large man. He was formed in a large mold. In person he was tall and of imposing presence. His mind was large and strong. He took broad views of every subject. His mind was philosophical and yet practical. He grasped a subject in its principles. Hence he was never a partisan. There was nothing small or petty about him. Blended with his breath and greatness there was the charm of simplicity. In all his writings, in all his addresses, there is no striving after effect…. In no great man has there been a finer blending of traits. With great virtues there are sometimes great faults. Strength in some points is counterbalanced by weakness in others. Dr. Hopkins was symmetrical, and that on a large scale. With all his ability, he trusted nothing to genius. He believed in discipline and culture, and his life was devoted to helping young men prepare themselves for the most efficient service for God and for man.

  To the last hour of his life Dr. Hopkins was eagerly seeking for truth, and in the search was finding larger tolerance and deeper faith. His works have long been in the hands of students who have found his “Moral Philosophy,” his “Outline Study of Man,” his “Law of Love, and Love as a Law,” and his “Strength and Beauty” full of a deep and adequate philosophy of life. And yet these books give but a faint impression of the greatness of a man whose personality was his source of power and who illustrated in his own ample and elevated life the range and inspiration of his thought…. Dr. Hopkins was pre-eminently a teacher and, therefore, a great ethical force. No truth was really mastered in his view until it had been carried to its consummation in character. It was the constant appeal to obligation which gave his teaching such immediate and final effect on all who sat in his class-room. Clear, open-minded, impatient of obscurity and pretense of all kinds, he seemed instinctively to find the heart of the question and to set it in large and right relation to the whole of things.

  President Hopkins was an exceptionally tall man, and rather thin, but he was wiry and quick in motion. His shoulders were broad, but slightly bent, and his forehead ample, rising above a pair of mild hazel eyes. He spoke with reasonable deliberation, in clear, full tones, which commanded instant respect; every one felt at once that some word of wisdom which he would not willingly lose was about to fall from those eloquent lips. He did not gesticulate much; it was unnecessary to the expression of his thought. He did not grow excited. Each thought carried its own weight. Gently but powerfully his own mind was working, and well he knew it would leave an indelible impression upon the mind of each hearer.

  It was the peculiarity of this teacher that he gave this stamp of universal relations in conditions largely provincial, and thus struck the keynote for many noble careers. For, whatever was provincial in any feature of our college life when I was a student at Williams, there was nothing provincial about Dr. Hopkins. Wherever he went, he was and he looked a citizen of the world, one might rather say a king of men, and this was preëminently true in the class-room. Whether he spoke, or prayed, or was silent, the observer knew that that massive head carried wisdom; and those eyes had looked into secrets of the widest range and application.

  Mark Hopkins is by general consent regarded as the typical American college president. James A. Garfield, the second martyr President of the United States, and at one time a pupil of Mark Hopkins, is reported to have said that a student on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other would make a university anywhere…. President Hopkins was an accurate scholar, a great thinker, a remarkably able administrator, a noble man. As a writer, as an orator, as a teacher, he was eminently successful. In character and influence he was as nearly ideal as can be expected of a man.

General

  In treating of natural religion, we are highly gratified to observe that Dr. Hopkins pursues [“Evidences of Christianity”] a happy line between the extremes of those on the one hand who almost deify reason, and those on the other hand who deny that any thing is discoverable in morals and religion without the Bible. So, in respect to ethics, we equally rejoice in his clear assertion, that “the utility of an action is one thing, and its rightness another,” and in his teaching that “the affections are not under the immediate control of the will.” Indeed, we cannot recall an instance in which this profound thinker and accomplished scholar has vented a paradox, or given forth a single oracle which can be relished by the recent boastful improvers of our philosophy. In such a station as that which he adorns, a severe reserve of this nature is of good augury for the coming race of scholars…. Every page bespeaks the thinker and the scholar. Dr. Hopkins is altogether full of the thought, which is let alone; and the result is a translucent style, such as one admires in Southey’s histories. If we were desired to characterize the work in a single word, that word should be clearness. We have never hesitated for an instant as to the meaning of a single sentence. In saying this, we say enough to condemn the book with a certain school…. The author has so cultivated the habit of looking at things in broad daylight, that his representations offer nothing to divert or distract the mind. The necessary result is beauty of diction; the style is achromatic…. In the true acceptation of the term, he is an original writer.

  It [“Evidences of Christianity”] possesses great merits. The style is clear, forcible, not infrequently rising into eloquence and always marked by a business-like character, proceeding by the shortest way towards the main point, as if the writer were too much in earnest to waste either his own or other’s time on matters of secondary importance. Having at the outset stated, with the good sense that characterises the whole volume, the precise object which he purposes to accomplish, he examines the question of the antecedent improbability of miraculous communication from God, and then shows how far miracles are susceptible of proof, and how far they are the fitting evidence of a Divine revelation.

  His peculiar tact in imparting instruction,—his powerful influence over young men, exciting both their reverence and their love,—his dignified yet affable manners, his kind and sympathizing heart, make him peculiarly fitted for the position he occupies. And when to these characteristics is added an intellect of great strength, as well as great breadth of view, combined with a rare fertility of illustration, we can readily conceive what an influence he must exert in giving “form and pressure” to hundreds of minds that are, in their turn, to take a leading part in moulding and directing public opinion.

  Through and through Hopkins is a transcendentalist and anti-agnostic. His teachings illustrate the yielding, in America, of Reid and “common-sense” philosophy to the influence of Germany and spiritual intuitions. In Hopkins, a Trinitarian Congregational minister, in many ways a conservative, and sometimes following the Edwardsian statements, appears an optimism not less serene than that of Emerson himself.

  There have been few Americans worthier of praise than Mark Hopkins. He built himself into the mental fabric of two generations of men. They hold him in gentle, loving and grateful remembrance. He erected in their hearts the “monument more enduring than brass.”… Many great eulogiums will yet be pronounced upon the work and character of President Hopkins; touching pictures will be drawn of his person, his manner and his inspiring companionship; historians will dwell upon his gentle but mighty influence in helping forward and upward the intellectual activities of the nineteenth century.

  The lectures on the “Evidences of Christianity” delivered in January, 1844, the first important book of Dr. Hopkins, bear clear marks of the great influence that Bishop Butler had exercised upon his mind. It seems at first thought singular that the “Analogy,” which was written with special reference to the unbelief of the last century, and had been published over a hundred years when Dr. Hopkins delivered these lectures, should have kept so firm a grasp on religious thought, and should leave its indelible marks on minds so different as, for instance, that of Cardinal Newman and that of Dr. Hopkins…. The one was indeed a Puritan, the other a Romanist. The one believed in the smallest amount of machinery in religious things and in the fullest liberty for a local church. The other was carried by his processes of thought to the acceptance of authority, to a profound hatred of schism, and to a fervent attachment to what he held as the one original Christian church. When Dr. Hopkins in conversation with one of the college professors regarding Robert Browning said, “I too am a mystic,” he expressed the affinity that he had with all the great spiritual teachers of the age; and though he would have rejected with disdain much of Newman’s sacramentalism, he accepted him as a brother in the higher region of spiritual thought, and with him emphasized always the immediate relation of the soul to the things unseen. No work of Newman’s shows more plainly or more beautifully the far-reaching effect of the great “Analogy” than these lectures by Dr. Hopkins on the “Evidences of Christianity.”

  He wrote eighty-two books, pamphlets, and articles of very considerable merit, but the two which were most widely used and most influential were the “Outline Study of Man” and “The Law of Love and Love as a Law.” These are great works.